Consultants say interference in vehicle electronics is possible

Consultants say interference in vehicle electronics is possible Neil Roland Automotive News -- March 23, 2010 - 4:42 pm ET

WASHINGTON -- Testing by Toyota Motor Corp. and other automakers has never detected electronic causes of sudden acceleration because it has looked for the wrong evidence and because this evidence is difficult to detect, three British consultants with doctorates in engineering said today.

The consultants, who expect to meet tomorrow with U.S. investigators, said Toyota's pedal assembly and electronic throttle-control system have a number of parts that aren't shielded against electromagnetic interference, or EMI.

"Thirty years' empirical evidence overwhelmingly points to (sudden acceleration) being caused by electronic system faults undetectable by inspection or testing," said Keith Armstrong, a engineering consultant from the United Kingdom who appeared with two other engineers at a Washington news conference organized here by consumer advocates.

Armstrong, who said he was interviewed last month by U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigators, said the problem with electronic interference is industrywide. "EMI is endemic in electronics," he said. EMI is electrical disturbances in the circuits.

Real-life EMI

Tests by Toyota and other automakers don't cover most real-life EMI, nor do they simulate typical faults to verify that backup measures work, Armstrong said.

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Reply to
C. E. White
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One word of caution - these experts are woking for the Center for Auto Safety, a trial lawyer funded group run by Clarence Ditlow and Jane Claybrook. They still want Audi to recal 1985 Audi 5000's.

Ed

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Reply to
C. E. White

I saw one the other day. I don't think the owner will sell it to them because it was in mint condition.

They can recall all the rest, I'm sure most of them have been in junkyards for a while...

Reply to
Hachiroku $B%O%A%m%/(B

I couldn't find an official toyota talk forum but I found this one....it has all the info about the 2010 Toyota Motor Corp. Recall & Prius brake pedal fix. I found it to be very informative, it has more commentary than just the official toyota recall site....

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check it out

Reply to
CaliforniaForestFires Org

I thought the auto industry had long been paranoid about this because when they were virtually mandated to install computers to meet emissions standards, it was a big leap for in technology and maybe the first time something so vulnerable to interference yet so critical to safety had been installed on such a large scale. And aren't almost all the sensor inputs for fairly low frequency signals that can be easily treated to filter out higher frequencies, such as those used by cell phones and speed radar? Also don't car computers have a timer that interrupts the main program every few milliseconds to check its proper operation and restart the computer if a problem is detected?

Here's a 30-year-old article from Popular Science about the first digital car computers (skip to page 54) that includes a photo of a test chamber used for zapping cars with interference:

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Reply to
larry moe 'n curly

Ironically, Audi ran magazine ads in the 1980s that discussed adapting Audis to America. In one ad they said the corrosion protection had to be improved to handle the salt we poured on the roads in the winter, and in another ad they said RF interference was a lot worse here than in Europe.

Reply to
larry moe 'n curly

I run high power two way radio equipment in my Toyota and have NEVER in almost seven years had one glitch of any kind. Nor has any of my cell phone equipment ever caused any glitches. EMI can easily be suppressed and I believe Toyota has done an extremely good job of suppressing it.

Reply to
dbu''

dbu'' wrote in news:VoCdnaFE4_R_kjfWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

I find it difficult to imagine how stray EMI could interfere with the throttle over a period of time and distance sufficiently long enough to cause a vehicle to accelerate to a high speed.

I also find it difficult to imagine how EMI could override many systems all at once, such that the car would be impossible to control or shut down.

Reply to
Tegger

I suspect software errors rather than interference. The auto industry is actually fairly good in designing resistance to interference, but in my opinion not very good on software design.

I used to work in aerospace industry and had some courses in designing mission critical software. It is very hard to check out software in a really large program, and design of real-time software is quite difficult. I suspect a lot of their software validation is statistical and that is not the best way.

Reply to
Don Stauffer

Airplanes have seen the same sort of interference from cell phones, but it doesnt seem to be very repeatable and is normally fleeting with no residual results.

Reply to
hls

I think that internal software or electronic hardware platform errors are far more likely that glitches due to cell phone signals, sun spots, etc...

Reply to
Obveeus

I suspect you may be correct. At this point it is not certain what has really happened in these claimed unintended acceleration cases.

Reply to
hls

"larry moe 'n curly" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@v20g2000prc.googlegroups.com:

CB radio and other spectrum unregulation no doubt.

Reply to
chuckcar

"hls" wrote in news:lOidnXyWTv70ozfWnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

Cell phones have a voltage spike just as the call is being connected. There was a Mythbusters episode that showed that.

BTW if there's anyone wondering, I am the same poster as fred. I created several nicks to avoid a stalking troll. It didn't work in the long term. Thanatoid probably knows what I'm talking about as he's dealt with the twit as well.

Reply to
chuckcar

When you have people running more than a kilowatt on CB, driving the system into overmodulation, etc., then there is a lot of RFI.

But CB is just a small thing. I believe that one of our health problems is that we are basically living in a microwave oven here.

Reply to
hls

"Obveeus" wrote in news:hodfar$8fb$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org:

I think glitches caused by the presence of free-and-easy tort are the most likely of all.

Reply to
Tegger

Just love how the factory engineers and federal regulators can examine a system for a couple of hours and then call it clean. I've spent literally weeks on the integration test bench running full bore with top-notch test equipment to tease out rare failure modes, both software and firmware. The bugs relating to race conditions, cross- domain timing errors, and sensitivity to normal component tolerances are especially entertaining--NOT!

Reply to
Jack Myers

I would think that, together, the NSTSA and Toyota engineers have plenty of knowledge and experience with this sort of testing and of Toyota's system. They may know what they are doing when it comes to looking for problems. In addition, the software errors that exist in the system (yes, I am nearly certain there are some) would be able to examined elsewhere (because the software in the system is a copy).

The type and amount of testing might be perfectly fine to get the information they need.

Jeff

Reply to
dr_jeff

"Jack Myers" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@n6wuz.net:

Absolutely. When I was in college we spend a solid week learning how to design input sets to check for faulty coding. It is in no way trivial.

Reply to
chuckcar

Yep. Hopefully the reason that the NHTSA bought up the computer board is so they can spend the next month or two with it tied into a logic analyzer.

Reply to
Obveeus

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